For a number of years, shopping over the internet has grown increasingly popular for both business and personal use as more merchants offer goods and services through associated websites. Normally, with an internet based shopping system, a customer accesses a website, views products and/or services and associated specifications, chooses a product and/or service for purchase, selects a delivery option, provides delivery and credit card payment information and authorizes a purchase transaction.
When ordering goods, many shopping systems provide a virtual shopping cart for holding items selected for purchase. Successive items selected for purchase are placed into the virtual shopping cart until a customer completes their shopping trip. Virtual shopping carts may be examined at any time, and their contents can be edited or deleted at the option of the customer. Once the customer decides to submit a purchase order, the customer may print the contents of the virtual shopping basket in order to obtain a hard copy record of the transaction.
Internet based shopping systems allow a customer a great deal of flexibility, and certain types of shopping systems have proven more successful than others. For example, shopping systems that offer commonly purchased and relatively higher priced goods/services are more economically feasible. For example, the sale of clothing, computers and airline tickets via electronic commerce has proven successful. Those shopping systems often provide shopping at a website owned by the brand name supplier, and therefore, competitive products do not have to be accommodated. Further, the higher priced goods/services provide the supplier with a higher average value and more cash flow per order. In addition, delivery is often provided by a third party delivery service with which the customer is often familiar; and in addition, the customer's expectations regarding delivery are based on the capabilities and experience with known delivery services. Most often, a customer is satisfied knowing a day or a range of days for the delivery. Also, with most electronic commerce systems, the goods are not perishable and do not require special handling. Finally, in many situations, the goods are available in their original packaging and do not have to be specially handled or repackaged for electronic commerce customers.
Electronic commerce or internet shopping systems for groceries are also available. However, grocery items are normally lower cost items, and often more items are required for purchase in order to provide an economically feasible minimum order. Further, an online grocery shopping system must provide numerous brand names for each item, each of which has unique product specifications, and that complicates the viewing and ordering process not only for the shopping system provider but also the customer. Also, once an order for grocery items is placed, often items, for example, produce, cannot be shipped in their original packaging and therefore, require special handling and repackaging. In addition, customers of grocery shopping expect that their order will be available and/or delivered within a relatively small time window, for example, a couple of hours, either on the day that the order is placed or, a day in the near future. Further, often a commercial delivery service does not exist that fulfills the needs of an online grocery shopping system. Therefore, the delivery must be provided by the supplier of the electronic commerce shopping system, and most often, such a supplier has little or no delivery capability and even less knowledge regarding how to execute an efficient delivery system.
As a consequence of the above, grocery shopping via electronic commerce has had only limited success. Often, to achieve economic success, the shopping service must be limited; and that, in turn, limits the capability of the grocery shopping service to fulfill the needs of the customer. Hence, the customer often is not satisfied shopping for groceries using an online or internet shopping system.
To improve customer satisfaction, there is a need for an improved and more flexible item ordering system. For example, with known systems, once a customer submits an order at the end of an online shopping session, the order is settled with a credit supplier and cannot be changed by the customer. Although this may be acceptable with many electronic shopping systems, it presents difficulties in an online grocery shopping system. Grocery shopping most often involves the purchasing of numerous, relatively low valued items, and it is common for a customer to later remember an item that was not purchased during the online shopping session. Placing another order for one or two items is not practical because of the minimum value requirement that is associated with each online order. Some shopping systems permit the customer to call in and supplement the order, however, such a capability is labor intensive and very inefficient and costly for the internet shopping system provider. Therefore, there is a need for a electronic commerce shopping system that permits a customer to return to the website and change the order after it has been submitted. Such a feature is more time efficient for both the customer and the shopping system provider and substantially more cost efficient for the shopping system provider.
There is a further need for an improved and more flexible delivery or service window capability. Known electronic shopping systems present available delivery windows to a customer based on delivery capacity and order volume, and the customer then selects one of the presented available delivery windows. However, in addition to the delivery of groceries, the online shopping system provider may permit a customer to pick up an order. Further, the online shopping system provider may also offer different order types for complementary goods and services, for example, flowers, food preparation and catering services. The availability and lead times for these other goods and services require that they have service windows that are different from the delivery windows associated with grocery shopping. Thus, there is a need for an electronic shopping system with the capability to present online customer service windows that are unique to different combinations of order types and pick up/delivery services provided.
There is also a need for an improved and more efficient system for picking the items necessary to fill an order. With known systems, orders are received, and picking lists are created that identify the goods, their location and thus, the order in which they are to be picked. However, with known systems, pickers are assigned picking lists as needed. While such systems are adequate in most environments, in a grocery shopping system, the picking process is more complicated. First, a large grocery store has a very large number of different departments, each having a large number of goods and brand names. To be efficient, arbitrarily assigning pickers to pick throughout the store requires that all of the pickers have a substantial knowledge regarding the brand names and locations of goods throughout the store. Such a vast knowledge is very difficult to quickly instill in a picker. Further, pickers often pick goods for different orders that are to be shipped by different carriers. With such a process, it is possible for an order to be inadvertently placed on the wrong delivery route or vehicle, thereby requiring that the order be returned and redelivered to the correct customer. Not only is the customer dissatisfied, but there is a substantial unrecoverable cost added to the order. Therefore, there is a need for an improved and more reliable order picking process.
There is a still further need for a more comprehensive post delivery customer service. Often when a customer has a complaint with a local grocery store, the customer either makes a phone call or returns to the store. In either event, the handling and resolving of the complaint by the grocery store requires the time of a store manager or similar person. The personalized handling of customer problems on the store premises can consume a substantial amount of time. If the requirement to service customer problems based on an online ordering and delivery service is superimposed on top of the servicing of the problems of walk-in customers, the customer service function can become a substantial burden on available resources. Therefore, there is a need to find a more efficient process and system for handling questions and problems that may arise with online customers.